I barely had the change to buy sodas and snacks along the way and there I am scratching out words with this absurdly expensive thing of polished resin and gold.

[11] House of Leaves has been translated into numerous languages, including Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, and Turkish.

Rather than Danielewski, the title page of House of Leaves credits two men named Zampanò and Johnny Truant as its authors.

In an introduction dated 1998, Truant claims to have found the book as an unfinished manuscript left by the recently deceased Zampanò, having never met the author in life.

Truant, an apprentice at a tattoo parlor in Los Angeles, decided to complete and submit the work for posthumous publication.

The rest of the book is punctuated by footnotes by Truant, whether fact-checking, editorializing, translating, or interjecting seemingly irrelevant personal anecdotes.

In support, Zampanò cites or quotes articles, journals, symposia, books, magazines, TV programs, and interviews, many supposedly dedicated to this film.

Zampanò discusses not only Navidson's filmmaking techniques, but also segues into topics such as photography, architecture, Biblical studies, and radiometric dating, often interspersing overwhelmingly esoteric tangents, several of which devolve into nonsensical, page-long lists of only superficially relevant items.

At the same time, Truant's own factual errors, limited knowledge, and open admission to adulterating Zampanò's work also throw his own reliability into question.

In the maze, they recorded footage of a multitude of corridors and rooms, completely unlit and featureless, with smooth ash-gray walls, floors, and ceilings.

The explorations, already challenged by the maze's inhospitable, vast, and ever-shifting nature, finally led to disaster when one of the crew turned on the rest.

She turned to filmmaking herself to reconcile her relationship with Navidson, while also showing his footage to literary, artistic, and scientific authorities such as Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick, Douglas Hofstadter, Ken Burns, Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia, Hunter Thompson, Anne Rice, and Jacques Derrida.

Navidson, still investigating the house, sought explanations from laboratory analysis, only to learn that samples taken from the maze are older than the Earth itself.

Parallel to the plot of the Record, Truant's footnotes document his descent into obsession, delusions, and paranoia as he compiles the manuscript.

Johnny Truant serves a dual role, as primary editor of Zampanò's academic study of The Navidson Record and protagonist as revealed through footnotes and appendices.

In the beginning of the book, Truant appears to be a normal, reasonably attractive young man who happens upon a trunk full of notes left behind by the now deceased Zampanò.

Initially intrigued by Zampanò's isolative tendencies and surreal sense of reality, Johnny unknowingly sets himself up as a victim to the daunting task that awaits him.

Lude assists Johnny many times in obtaining phone numbers of girls when they visit bars, clubs, and restaurants.

Navidson is said to be a Pulitzer winner and recipient of prestigious arts grants, who has jeopardized his relationship with Karen due to years of prolonged absences while working overseas.

During the explorations, with Navidson lost in the maze for days, Karen is seen to have confronted this loss and is said to have overcome her dependency on him, finally making good on her ultimatum to depart with their children.

Billy Reston is described as an African-American engineering professor at the University of Virginia, rendered paraplegic by a construction site accident near Hyderabad.

Over several explorations, Roberts, accompanied by assistants Kirby "Wax" Hook and Jed Leeder, found the spiral staircase but could not reach the bottom after many hours.

[15] Notable examples include: Throughout the book, various changes in typeface serve as a way for the reader to quickly determine which of its multiple narrators’ work they are currently following.

The album Haunted also draws heavily from the novel, featuring tracks called "House of Leaves", "Exploration B" and "5&½ Minute Hallway", and many less obvious references.

In the present, unknown forces steal both films from Skiadyne and return them to Avignon, leading to a high-stakes fight for control.

"[25] Steven Poole, writing in The Guardian, admired the book and interpreted it as a parody of academia: "Danielewski...weaves around his brutally efficient and genuinely chilling story a delightful and often very funny satire of academic criticism.

"[26] Steven Moore, writing in The Washington Post, also praised the novel: "Danielewski's achievement lies in taking some staples of horror fiction – the haunted house, the mysterious manuscript that casts a spell on its hapless reader – and using his impressive erudition to recover the mythological and psychological origins of horror, and then enlisting the full array of avant-garde literary techniques to reinvigorate a genre long abandoned to hacks.

"[27] The Village Voice's Emily Barton was less impressed: "Danielewski’s bloated and bollixed first novel certainly attempts to pass itself off as an ambitious work; the question for each reader is if the payoff makes the effort of slogging through its endless posturing worthwhile.

"[28] Scholar David Letzler identified the book as an encyclopedic novel, drawing on the faux-academic writing conventions and narrative "cruft" of Infinite Jest in particular.

[31][32][33] Critic Jacob Geller posited the book as an inspiration behind the video games Anatomy (2016) and Control (2019), citing its reimagining of an innocuous family home as an ancient, malicious entity.